The present invention relates generally to wireless communication systems, and more specifically to a system and method for a telephone user to obtain information about an advertised product or service, participate in voting or polling activities, reprint an article or other publication, request and authorize a purchase of a magazine subscription, music sound clip, or other product, and/or share personal information with other users.
Marketers of various types of goods and services must be able to communicate product information to potential customers. Great efforts have been made to provide product information in ways that are effective, in terms of who the information is provided to, and the nature of the information provided. The difference between effective and ineffective product marketing campaigns often hinges on the specific advertising techniques used.
Various specific forms of advertising are currently in use, including television, radio, print, on-line and billboard advertising. In many cases, the people exposed to a given advertisement have differing degrees of interest in the product or service being advertised. For example, some of the people that see a billboard advertising a certain product might be completely uninterested in buying the advertised product, while others might become interested in obtaining more information about the product. In existing advertising approaches, when a potential customer desires further information regarding an advertised product, they must take some sort of affirmative step to obtain such information. The required step might be calling a toll-free “800” telephone number given in the advertising itself, or entering a URL web address later on their PC at home. However, such approaches are often inconvenient, since the telephone number must be quickly memorized, and the necessary call involves a voice conversation that provides more information about the product. The time at which the advertisement is seen or heard may not be a time when the potential customer can conveniently place the call. Additionally, if sufficient time passes after a toll-free telephone number is seen (and possibly recorded by the customer in some way), the potential customer may forget about it completely, and the call may never be placed. Other advertised sources of additional product information, such as Web sites, suffer from similar problems, since they require the potential customer to maintain interest in the product after exposure to the initial advertisement until a later point in time when the additional information can be expressly obtained. Remembering long and complex URLs for web sites after the initial advertising exposure has proven to be problematic for advertisers. The point of maximum influence from the advertiser's perspective is in the few seconds after the advertisement has been seen by the consumer. This is the so called emotional connection period and is the point when call to actions are most likely to elicit a response. Moreover, these existing techniques for providing additional product information cannot provide information tailored to an individual requester, since usually a single “800” number or Web site is, at least initially, accessed by all potential customers.
The increasing use and availability of mobile telephones, referred to also as cell phones and/or wireless phones, makes it more convenient for a potential customer to immediately dial an “800” number for additional information regarding an advertised product. However, the time required to obtain information in a voice conversation may still be a deterrent to many people making a call at the time they see the advertisement, since they are often busy driving or performing some other activity that makes placing a lengthy phone call impractical or impossible. Moreover, a potential consumer viewing an advertisement may not have a practical way to record information obtained during a phone call that they could refer to later.
For these reasons and others, it would be desirable to have a system for providing product information to potential customers that does not require them to dial a telephone number and obtain information through a voice based conversation, or be connected to a confusing IVR/Automated Attendant phone system, or remember a long URL, and/or have to enter a URL into a web enabled phone, which may be inconvenient with regard to URL entry. The system should facilitate the provision of personalized product information to potential customers, and minimize the resources used to provide such information, such as telephone system bandwidth. Additionally, the system should be convenient to set up for a given advertiser and/or product, and minimize the time required of the potential customer to request the information.